SSA 


WH 


Ree 


% 


\ 


pO fp 4 
» 
~~ 
hal a 
Gite.pF2 
SA Show 
"“@a*ene 


ren 
an 


= 


Wie hip 
WN 


@ 


4 +d 
\\ 
ON) 


WH, 
NY 


a 


Us 
NAY 


Fadi dect eating 


« 
ope 


oe 
1° 

td . 
- 


SS i critical 
SUTVE 


2 


se? a > 
ene 
«Get he s 
¥ 
. ne ¥. 
Pe nar EA 


Ped kab: 
ae 4 


. 
wee. 


®% or - 
3 . e ‘sf Jt 
. oar Ss 
v = * = J ° 
fe Cy . 
SEK 
z 
- 
ay » 
ad Bye 
a* 


ry 


oe gS |S o> 


3 
oO ANAS ASA te 
7 ‘, . 


So ae 


-_-— = <a 


_ ° 
as i OSS 


cS Shee BH KEE TE 


as BEES oie (( Gu 


Ta a atari See? 2p aie = aS Pi ¥ o 


i 


Pe re 
. 
* 
“a 


om 


*« 


a 


(ag ‘yoog wuaquay us fo u01492]10.)) 
"yoAa] UBA LIOQn_T ‘asyaindasy ayy 4D SAUD] IadYT YT, 


i) Oe 


FLEMISH ART 
A 


CRITICAL SURVEY 
BY 
ROGER FRY 


CHATTO AND WINDUS 
LONDON 
1927 


PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN ; 


e : ” 
r 


PREFACE 
a hex exhibition of Flemish Art held at Burlington House 


in the winter of 1926—7 aroused such widespread interest 

that the committee of the National Art Collections Fund 
decided to invite the members of that society to a lecture on the 
exhibition, which was delivered in the Queen’s Hall on March 24, 
1927. The following pages are the text of that lecture with a 
few minor alterations and with the inclusion of some passages 
which were not delivered on that occasion for want of time. 


ILLUSTRATIONS 


frontispiece 


Hubert van Eyck. The three Maries at the Sepulchre (Fig. 5) 


Oo ON NAP WD DY 


— ke 
mw O 


Le 
ce 
14. 
Lr. 
16. 
17. 
18. 
19. 
20: 
“ae 
27: 


Figures 1-4, 6-11 following page 16 


. Rogier van der Weyden. Portrait of a Lady 

. Lorenzo di Credi. Portrait of Andrea Verrochio 

. Pol de Limbourg. Ile St. Louis 

. Miniature from the “Heures de Turin”’ 

. John van Eyck. Portrait of Canon van der Paele 

. John van Eyck. Portrait of the Artist’s Wife 

. Hubert van Eyck. Crucifixion 

. Rogier van der Weyden. Deposition from the Cross 
. Rogier van der Weyden. Deposition from the Cross 
. Petrus Christus. Portrait of a Carthusian (?) 


Figures 12-22 following page 32 
Petrus Christus. Nativity 
Hans Memling. Madonna and Child with Angel 
Quentin Metsys. Madonna and Child with Angels 
Quentin Metsys. Madonna and Child with Two Angels 
Quentin Metsys. Portrait of Egidius 
Jerome Bosch. St. Jerome 
Pieter Brueghel. Proverb of the Bird-nesters (with Fig. 12) 
Pieter Brueghel. The Fall of Icarus 
Pieter Brueghel. January Day 
Frans Floris. Portrait of a Lady 
Rubens. Adoration of the Magi 
Vil 


23, 
24. 
25% 
26. 
oA 
28. 
20). 
30. 
a3, 


Rubens. 
Rubens. 
Rubens. 
Rubens. 
Rubens. 
Rubens. 


[Mustrations 


Figures 23-31 following page 48 
Martyrdom of St. Ursula 
Flight into Egypt 
Portrait of Yrsselius 
Portrait of Marqués de Legafiez 
The Timber Waggon 
Landscape. Moonlight 


Jordaens. The Burgomaster of Diest and his Wife 
Jordaens. Pan and Syrinx. (With Fig. 24) 


Brouwer. Landscape 


Vill 


FLEMISH ART 


PART I 


HE English are often accused by their too candid 

foreign friends of being grossly practical, incapable 

of responding to the things of the spirit, insensitive 

to the refining influence of the arts. Those who have fre- 

quented Burlington House in the past few months and 

watched the crowds of people of all classes waiting patiently 

in [close-pressed queues in order to stare for a few seconds 

at a few square inches of painted panel must have felt 

the gross injustice of this accusation—may almost have 

wished, for their own convenience, that it had been a little 
less untrue. 

No—we are passionately addicted to painting, provided 
we get the painting we like, and it is very apparent that at 
Burlington House we found what we wanted. 

I know that some disgruntled esthetes who had come from 
abroad to see the pictures and found their view confined to 
the backs of rival admirers, declared that this enthusiasm was 
worked up by the Press, that the knowledge that a King and 
Queen had flown across the Channel to see it had hypnotized 
the public into a subjective appreciation. But strong as the 

I B 


Flemish Art 


forces of snobbery may be I doubt their power to compel such 
strenuous exertion if it had not been rewarded by some more 
solid enjoyment. 

At any rate I, for one, believe that a very large public has 
genuinely and sincerely enjoyed these pictures. The word in 
which this enjoyment was most frequently described to me 
was the word “heavenly.” The rhetorical question, “Isn’t 
it a heavenly exhibition?” was addressed to me on many 
occasions. I understood of course that this expressed deep 
admiration, but I could not help being surprised by the choice 
of that particular adjective. Had we been looking at the 
works of Simone Martini, Lorenzetti and Fra Angelico the 
word would have seemed appropriate, but what characterizes 
the Flemish school throughout its whole course is rather its 
extreme earthliness. Both its qualities and defects arise from 
the fact that these people found themselves very much at 
home on the surface of our planet. They were entirely 
satisfied with the profitable industry of their cosy, familiar 
townships and with the rude plenty of their well-kept farms. 
They enjoyed the things of this life with so wholesome, so 
uncritical an appetite that they loved to see in their pictures 
vivid reminiscences of what was so familiar and so dear to 
them. Even their religion became moulded to this habitual 
bent of their character. It adapted itself to that and inspired 
a simple unquestioning and uncritical pietism which allowed 
even their conceptions of transcendent realities to keep a 

2 


Flemish Art 


homely quality and a childlike literalness. Even when the 
Renaissance came to shake to its foundations the medieval 
system, religion readapted itself to these fundamental needs, 
and we find Rubens able to conciliate a frankly pagan sensual- 
ism with an unquestioning and whole-hearted orthodoxy, 
whilst his contemporary Jordaens could leave out all sugges- 
tions of spirituality and revel unashamedly in the world of 
sense. 

Such then is, to my mind, the most striking and general 
characteristic of this curiously homogeneous and home-grown 
art. It marks it off sharply from the other great school of 
European painting, the Italian. In that, the demands of the 
spirit were more insistent, leading on the one hand to the 
ecstatic religious art of the Sienese and of Fra Angelico, and 
on the other to a conscious and deliberate rationalizing, to the 
persistent search for universal principles,—towards a pure 
science and a pure esthetic. 

One instance of the different reactions of the Italians and 
Flemings to the pictorial problem may suffice. As, at the 
beginning of the fifteenth century, the artists of both coun- 
tries began to explore the rendering of the appearance of 
objects in space, they became aware of the convergence of 
lines perpendicular to the picture plane towards what we call 
the vanishing point. Van Eyck and his followers appear to 
have solved the problem by careful and precise observation of 
each successive situation; Brunelleschi in Florence instantly 


3 


Flemish Art 


sought for the general law, stated it mathematically and 
launched the painters of Florence on a rather desperate ven- 
ture, that of substituting for careful imitation the power to 
construct even such complex forms as the human figure by 
means of mathematical formule. The venture led, as all such 
applications of abstract ideas to the infinite complexity of 
nature generally do, to some rather absurd and unconvincing 
results—as we can see in our battle picture by Paolo Ucello in 
the National Gallery—but it led finally to a clearer notion of 
pictorial space-construction. 

There you get in a single technical case the contrast I wish 
to enforce between the intellectual power, the passion for 
abstract truth and for law of the Southern temperament, as 
against the acceptance of the immediate, actual reality, the 
uncritical and literal spirit of the Northerner. 

And it is along these lines that we shall find both the 
qualities and the defects of this interesting art. And at once 
a specific quality of the Flemish masters greets us on the 
threshold, namely their extraordinary craftsmanship, their 
quick elaboration and their perfect control of the medium of 
oil pigment. We are still left in astonishment at the richness 
and glow of their colours, at the perfect preservation of panels 
on which the tooth of time seems to gnaw in vain. 

The next quality which strikes us is the precision and 
accuracy of their outlines. If we were to accept as the aim of 
drawing the creation of an image which reminded us in every 


4 


Flemish Art 


detail of some actual figure or object in nature we should be 
inclined to say that they were the best of draughtsmen. If 
we consider a minute and detailed verisimilitude a great 
pictorial quality, then the Flemish primitives stand almost 
unrivalled. The very fact that their vision is so quick and 
unreflecting makes them satisfied with the vision of everyday 
practical life, and by so much the more accessible to the 
untrained eye. 

Again and again at Burlington House I was struck by the 
fact that it was just this everyday attitude to objects and 
textures that aroused such delight. It was the transparency of 
muslin veils, the glitter of jewels or the sheen of brocades, the 
recognition of which, in the painted imitation, gained the 
highest meed of praise. ‘The vision of these painters was so 
little removed from the vision we employ for buying stuffs in 
a shop that it required no effort of reflection to recognize its 
accuracy and effectiveness. 

But this everyday vision has not been the concern of the 
greatest painters; they have sought to place themselves at a 
greater distance from the phenomena of nature, to view them 
with a more detached eye, to be less entangled in their imme- 
diate references and implications. They have sought by that | 
contemplative and disinterested vision to discover those more 
universal truths which escape the untrained vision, distorted as 


it is from infancy, by the needs of the practical and instinctive 
life. 


Flemish Art 


In the vision of everyday life we cannot see the wood for 
the trees, we are arrested by the distinctive details, we miss 
the more general facts. To take the simplest example, every 
one sees at once the features of a face; we are trained for this 
by the pressing need of reading its expression. No one but 
an artist who has cultivated the contemplative vision ever sees 
the head, ever notices those minute gradations of tone, those 
almost imperceptible changes of distinctness in the contour by 
which we grasp an idea of the volume of the whole head and 
the relation of mask to skull. 

Let me make this clear by a comparison. Here, in 
Rogier van der Weyden’s portrait of a lady (Fig. 1), we have 
a marvellously accurate record of all the visible edges of a 
mask. The skill with which van der Weyden has followed 
the movement of these contours is extraordinary, nor is he 
without a certain rhythmic bias which gives to all the lines 
a common property, so that they make an agreeable linear 
pattern. It is a refined and detailed catalogue, or rather 
map, of the features, but there is no sense of their relations 
upon the more or less spherical volume of a head. 

The plastic movements which the image suggests are only 
slight variations on a flat surface as of a map in low relief. 
They do not imply any wide co-ordination of the planes; we 
feel clearly, that is, the relation of each plane to the one next 
to it, but not the relations of all the planes together. 

Even more typical than the treatment of the head is that 

6 


Flemish Art 


of the hands. In the first place they are far too small in 
proportion to the head, a peculiarity of almost all Flemish 
portraits which is closely connected with this absence of plastic 
feeling. ‘Then whilst each finger is carefully outlined and 
more or less modelled, the artist has fixed all his attention on 
the intricate linear pattern which those outlines make, he 
gives us no idea of the volume which all these fingers of the 
two hands compose. 

And now look at this portrait by Lorenzo di Credi (Fig. 2). 
I have chosen the work of an artist who occupies in the Italian 
school a much lower position than van der Weyden does in 
the Flemish, in order that you may see the general application 
of this distinction. At once you notice the much greater 
amplitude of movement. Our imagination is stimulated to 
grasp much larger ranges of relations, or to put it technically 
the rhythmic phrase embraces a great many more elements. 
We feel at once the rotundity of the head as a whole; detail 
may be found in it, but the detail is seen after the whole, not 
before it. Then again we feel the body in a quite different 
way, its existence in space, its relation to the head and 
limbs. Again the hands here have their own relation to the 
head and body and their volume is clearly expressed. 

It is important to note this capital distinction. It would 
be absurd to deny—indeed we shall have evidence of it to-night 
—that some great imaginative minds have expressed them- 
selves in painting without attaining to this generalized vision, 


vs 


Flemish Art 


but in so far as they have failed of it they have remained in 
what we may call a provincial tradition—have remained out- 
side the great European tradition founded by Giotto. That 
central tradition has always found more ready acceptance in 
Latin than in Teutonic countries, but none the less the supreme 
masters of Northern lands have abandoned their provincial 
idiom and learned to practise the principles of plastic design. 
It is thus that we shall see Rubens break away from his 
Flemish ancestry, it is thus that Rembrandt becomes almost 
the greatest of plastic designers, and that in our own country 
Constable stands out as speaking the European rather than 
the national idiom. 

If I seem to have been underlining the difference between 
the Flemish and the Italian tradition to the detriment of the 
Northern school it is only in order to help us to estimate its 
specific character more precisely and to enable us to appreci- 
ate more fully what it was destined ultimately to bring in to 
the great central traditions when in due time the two became 
united. 

For that very homeliness of the Flemish painters, that 
naive delight in the things of daily life, that absence of the 
generalizing spirit did bring in a richness of content, a 
diversity and complexity of material which were of the 
utmost importance. For the generalizing scientific spirit of 
the Southerner in the end emptied art too completely of 
content, gave to it a too cold and academic abstraction. Like 


8 


Flemish Art 


Anteus it lost power when it left the earth for too long. 
Its force could only be renewed by a fresh contact with 
that, and it was here that it found salvation precisely in the 
earthliness of Flemish art. Neither Rubens nor Rembrandt 
are thinkable without that native Northern background 
of uncritical delight in the familiar aspects of everyday 
life. 

Taking now a wide general view of the Flemish school, 
what I find is an art of painting growing out of the general 
tradition of Gothic design. This essentially native indigenous 
art of painting is marked by its literal imitation of familiar 
things, its astonishing skill, its incapacity for the contempla- 
tive vision, its ignorance of, and indifference to, the universal 
aspects of form. But, given that naive unreflecting vision, 
it shows astonishing quickness of observation and brilliance 
and solidity of technique. 

For nearly a century this school pursues its course un- 
affected by the outside world—then comes the Italian inva- 
sion. The Flemish artists at first are merely dazzled and 
bewildered by it. It destroys their native practice without 
building anything solid in its place. This period of hesitant, 
fluctuating, and uncertain art continues for a good part of the 
sixteenth century, but by the beginning of the seventeenth 
the real principles of Italian design begin to be grasped, and 
just at the moment that Italian art is becoming exhausted 
Rubens takes the torch from the feeble hands of the Academics 


9 


Flemish Art 


and revivifies, by his native raciness, the central European 
idiom of art. 

If we can keep some such general scheme as this in our 
minds the significance of individual artists in relation to the 
whole cultural situation of Europe will, I think, become clearer; 
they will stand out in truer relation to their background. 

Let us then begin at the beginning. 

Almost any miniature of the thirteenth century affords us 
the type of that general Gothic tradition of design from which 
the pictorial art of Flanders took its rise. It is essentially an 
art of isolated forms connected together according to decora- 
tive rather than pictorial principles. It is an art of traditional 
types which are only modified in a slight degree by the artist’s 
observation of life or his personal predilections. Its references 
to natural appearance are of the slightest. Its main purpose 
is a decorative symbolism by means of easily recognized and 
conventional attributes. 

A similar art to this was common to the whole of Europe 
in the thirteenth century—lItalian painting like Flemish 
developed out of that—but in Italy the type form of that art 
was the fresco, whereas in Flanders it was the miniature. 

This difference was of capital importance in determining 
the lines which either school followed. For the fresco, being 
visible at a distance, what counted first and last was the main 
disposition of the forms, the large leading lines, the pictorial 
architecture. In the miniature the scale is too small for these 

IO 


Flemish Art 


things to produce much effect; we are not very sensitive to the 
general proportions, we look at once to small incisive details, 
the expression of a face, the detailed shapes and colours of 
flowers in a meadow, and leaves on a tree. We expect 
interesting images rather than impressive architectonic 
design. The fresco affects us almost like architecture—its 
large scale is part of its effect—the miniature is a picture 
book. 

The Italian school being tied to the fresco was bound to 
keep in view the large co-ordinating lines and masses: any- 
thing like literal realism was too refractory to take its place in 
such ascheme. It could only win its way little by little; before 
it could take its place it required to be assimilated to the 
necessities of architectonic design. 

But the very laxness of formal design in the miniature 
allowed almost anything to find a place. The most literal 
imitation was possible if once the desire for it became mani- 
fest. That desire was evidently present in the mind of the 
Duc de Berri who was the great patron of Northern art at the 
beginning of the fifteenth century, and he found in Pol de 
Limbourg an artist capable of satisfying it. 

Here in this view of the Ie St. Louis by Pol de Limbourg 
(Fig. 3) we pass almost at a bound from the decorative Gothic 
system to a quasi-photographic literalism. Pol de Limbourg 
was unhampered by any principles of formal design, by 
any rhythmic necessities when he desired to give a literal 

II 


Flemish Art 


transcription of any scene calculated to please the fancy of his 
Ducal patron. And thus free, he finds himself able to treat 
a number of motives which painting had hitherto never 
attacked—the aspects of the countryside at all seasons—we 
have a vivid snow scene—and at all hours—he does not hesi- 
tate to depict twilight effects. There is nothing elsewhere in 
the history of art quite like this sudden leap into the un- 
explored world of natural appearance, and this was made 
possible by the peculiar conditions of the miniature. And it 
was this that set the key of Flemish painting. 

The Duc de Berri had relations with the Netherlands 
and particularly with William IV of Hainault. One of the 
Duc de Berri’s elaborately coloured manuscripts, but an 
unfinished one, passed into William of Hainault’s hands, and 
there is every reason to believe that some of the miniatures 
subsequently done in that book, to his order, are the work 
of Hubert van Eyck. 

Now I must warn you that in talking of Hubert van 
Eyck I am treading on dangerous ground, on a veritable 
battlefield between rival authorities. Some of these have 
reduced him to a shadowy ghost-like figure, almost to a myth, 
to others he is a great and clearly recognizable personality. 
I am fortunately no authority. All I can do therefore is to 
choose between the alternative theories the one which agrees 
best with the esthetic phenomena as they present themselves 
to my mind. 

I2 


Flemish Art 


Here then (Fig. 4), if I am right, we have a miniature by 
Hubert van Eyck—certainly this is the work of a very strange 
and original artist. Pol de Limbourg was a marvellous 
transcriber of nature but very little of an artist in the proper 
sense of the word, but the author of this miniature shows at 
once a far finer sensibility to natural effect and a rare power 
of attuning everything to a particular emotional key. It is 
here the effect on the imagination of the vast expanse of the 
flat seashore and the luminosity and multiplicity of the sky 
that gives a strange and impressive significance to the Ducal 
cavalcade; for this represents Hubert’s patron William of 
Hainault. 

Nothing else that I know in European art strikes quite 
the same note as these miniatures, no other artist has used the 
implications of landscape quite in this way. It reminds one 
almost more of the attitude of certain Chinese masters than 
that of any other Western artist. 

In another miniature representing the Deposition one can 
see that this mysterious artist whom I cannot help thinking 
is no other than Hubert van Eyck was also a great master of 
composition. Nothing could be finer than the balanced and 
easy massing of these figures, and most noticeable of all is the 
peculiarly intimate relation established between them and the 
landscape. It is all of a piece, all consequent and consistent. 
We shall not among all the other primitives meet with any 
compositions in which the landscape takes its place so 


= 


Flemish Art 


inevitably, so unobtrusively and yet with so ae i an 
effect on our feelings. 

Whoever was the author of these miniatures he must also be 
regarded as the author of the picture of the “Three Maries at 
the Sepulchre” in Sir Herbert Cook’s collection (Fig. 5, Frontis- 
piece). This was one of the glories of the Flemish Exhibition. 
It is connected with the miniatures by innumerable corre- 
spondences which I will not go into. More important is it to 
recognize here too that same strangely penetrating imagina- 
tion which is able to relate figures to landscape in an entirely 
new way. For here too the mood of strange exaltation so 
perfectly adapted to the secrecy of the visit to the tomb and 
to the mystery of its being found empty is given quite as 
definitely by the dawn light breaking across the wide expanse 
of valley and hill as by the figures themselves. 

The composition here is very deliberate. It is no merely 
casual adjustment of the figures necessitated by the story, but 
implies a strong imaginative grasp of formal relations. It is 
based mainly on two diagonals which start from the sharp 
angle of the soldier’s cloak in the centre foreground. From 
this point the diagonals diverge to right and left like the legs 
of a widely opened compass holding between them the wide 
vista of rocky landscape in which the town of Jerusalem lies. 
This main motive is elaborated by many details and subtle 
variations, as in the poses of the sleeping soldiers, whilst 
against it is played a kind of inversion made by the pyra- 


14 


Flemish Art 


midal form of the angel and the sweep of the robe of the 
kneeling Mary. Throughout, the evidences of a powerful 
feeling for unity in the design are very marked. No other 
primitive picture at Burlington House gave one quite this 
idea of a consistent formal harmony. 

Hubert van Eyck shows himself in all these works as an 
artist with an extraordinary intensity of imaginative feeling. 
It is an imagination so intense that it moulds all the forms to 
its purpose and the emotional key is of that exalted kind, has 
that remoteness from everyday feelings, that we call for con- 
venience poetic because it is the key of most, though by no 
means all, great poetry. As far as I can see none of his fol- 
lowers had this special power of lifting everything into that 
rarified and intense atmosphere. 

Certainly John van Eyck is distinguished from his elder 
brother in this respect. If we call Hubert a poet, John appears 
as a prosaist. He is far more interested in the literal facts of 
what is before his eyes than in the strange and moving impli- 
cations which the great imaginative minds discover in those 
facts. John does not seek to go beyond and behind them. 
But he pushes the power of rendering these facts accurately 
and clearly to an unparalleled height. No one has ever been 
able to give so true a record of so many facts without losing 
his way among them. 

Here, in the portrait of Canon van der Paele (Fig. 6), you 
see his overpowering interest in the wrinkled texture of the 


i» 


Flemish Art 


old Canon’s skin. It is so great that the wrinkles are the first 
thing we see. We see them before we grasp the general form: 
indeed that is never given vividly to the imagination. None 
the less John’s eye was so accurate that he records the general 
proportions with astonishing correctness. A smaller artist 
would have been inevitably led into distortion in the process 
of following all those details. But here too it is the literal 
fact before him that dominates. He reports what happened, 
he does not interpret it; he finds no underlying principle or 
law. It arouses in his mind no special emotional reaction. 
He remains an incomparable reporter. 

That marvellous exactitude of literal reporting without 
any evaluation is so astonishing a feat that it arouses in our 
minds a curious shock of surprise and delight, and from his 
report we can even construct for ourselves a very distinct 
character. Here, in the portrait of his wife (Fig. 7), we guess, 
for instance, how poor a time the maids had in the yan Eyck 
household. But except for the passion with which John 
exercises his strange gift he remains neutral and impassive 
even before his own wife. The inscription on the frame, 
*‘Als ick kan” —“‘As well as I can,” is a naive confession of the 
natural pride he felt in that gift of reporting what the vision of 
life affords. For John van Eyck was entirely innocent of that 
contemplative vision which discovers universal principles 
underlying the particular forms with which it is confronted. 
Was he, then, one has to ask, only the most marvellous re- 

16 


“Ziff  “IpeD (‘uoaW “AM maspuy “uoH ayy fo uor92110) ay U7) 


Ip OZUdIOT ‘O1Y990LLa4 ap vaspup fo jwdq.og ‘uspAoM Jop uA Jolsoy ‘“ApvT v fo poysog 


6 “Old Wen 


Ls) 


(‘uuny ‘ajpuoynn anbayjz01qiq) 
co UIN ST, ap Sadna FT ie ay] Worf IANIDIU1 JY 


‘sINOqUIIT 8p [Og 


RIUALIE URY AN 


€ “OId 


aS 


. 


(‘sasnag ap Jpunuwumoy) apsnpy) (saSnag ap jounwwoy apsnpy) 


"OAT UvA uyo[ ‘afiy S,qSUYd4 VY Ay] fo JUDA] AO] "yOAKT UBA UYOf ‘ajavq dap una uouny fo 1104] 40 ¢] 


& 


9 ‘Old 
4 Old 


(pry djapyliygd ‘UO1j}IITJO) Uuosuyof) 
"yoA UBA JIOGQN]Y "WOIXYfLINLD IY | 


8 ‘OI 


("W02}99]]0) ayva147) 


‘uspADA\ Jop UPA JIIGOY ‘“SsodD ay] wodf Uorisodag 


hd 


(‘wnasnp sjassnag) 


‘uapAdM\ Jop UPA IOLdOY “SsodgQ ay] wodf uoipsodagq 


Ot “Old 


AN 


‘ 


ses 2 


~ 


11 


FIG. 


Petrus” Christus. 


Porirail woy a Carinusian (:): 


¥ y . 
fi at e , Peak , 
‘i I 2 
¢ 42 ly J a ‘ 
i : i Z 
rt oa 
. 4 . 
i , 
- 
‘ 
‘ 
r é i 
1 
‘ 
nf 
‘ 
” 
D 
\ 
‘ 
2 t 
. ’ 
‘ ' 
z 
I< 


3 Flemish Art 


porter in paint and not an artist in the proper sense at all? No 
—he had one quality which does not depend on the accidental 
nature of the facts he reports. He had an instinctive sense for 
thythm of line and harmony of tone. 

That linear rhythm is evident here in the delicate calli- 
graphic quality of the contours of the features and of the folds 
of the white headdress. It is not an obvious or flowingly 
melodious rhythm, but it exercises a pervading influence on 
the quality of the line throughout. His feeling for tone 
harmony is evident in the delicate opposition of the pale flesh 
to the white hennin. A less subtle artist would have indulged 
in a coarser contrast in the hope of strengthening his effect. 
John van Eyck is too sure of himself to need any exaggera- 
tion. He observes always the exact measure. 

But we must note here how entirely John van Eyck’s vision 
is concerned with the values of everyday life. For those, the 
facial expression and the character of the hand, are of capital 
importance. ‘The expression of the body as a whole is little 
thought of by Northern people who use gesture so little, and 
so John van Eyck’s vision, so accurate where his interest is 
engaged, relaxes altogether over the body. No volume pro- 
portional to the head is suggested, no indication of the move- 
ment of planes; we are totally at a loss to account for the arm 
or to explain the position and action of the hand which seems 
attached to the body like a turtle’s flapper, so little has John 

van Eyck been interested in plastic relations. 
‘ 17 c 


Flemish Art 


Although one of his most striking portraits, this is by no 
means one of his best. Our own portrait in the National 
Gallery with ‘Leal Souvenir’’ written on the frame shows his 
linear rhythm in a far finer degree, and so also does the John 
Arnolfini from Berlin. There the contours of the features are 
traced with a wonderful sense of their rhythmic possibilities, 
and a delightful intricate linear maze is followed through the 
convolutions of the turban. The volume of the body is more 
proportional to the head, though the design of the hands (as 
usual far too small) shows how insensitive he was to plastic 
continuity. 

On the whole we must, I think, conclude that John van 
Eyck’s immense reputation rests mainly on his preter- 
natural skill in reporting rather than on the importance 
of his imaginative attitude or on any remarkable esthetic 
sensibility. 

We must turn now to the next great figure, that of Rogier 
van der Weyden, the slightly younger contemporary of John 
van Eyck and the founder of the Brussels school. 

In marked contrast to the impassive objectivity of John 
van Eyck, Rogier’s was a highly imaginative nature. He 
uses painting as the medium to express an intensely personal 
and vivid devotionalism. He explores the means by which 
to arouse the emotions of pity and grief, and his portraits show 
a strong psychological bias. His vision is always subordinated 
to these ends. He has none of John van Eyck’s curiosity 


18 


Flemish Art 


about the literal facts of appearance. He accepts the general 
idiom of realistic description current in the school—and here 
perhaps he relies on his fellow-artist Campin (whom I am 
forced for want of time to leave out) rather than on van 
Eyck. He accepts that idiom but does not enrich it—all his 
energy is devoted to bending it to his purposes of dramatic 
and psychological expression. 

Even more than in the case of John van Eyck the under- 
lying esthetic basis of van der Weyden’s design depends 
on linear rhythm. He is at least as unconscious of the 
relations of volumes or of their situation in space as van 
Eyck, but on the other hand his feeling for linear rhythm 
is more consistent. He is able to sustain a much longer 
phrase and thereby build up a more close-knit and coherent 
composition. 

Hubert van Eyck clearly had the power to create highly 
significant compositions; John merely put things together 
so as to get them conveniently into the picture; but with 
van der Weyden composition is again a definite mode of 
expression. 

His great masterpiece in this respect is the Deposition at 
the Escorial, where a single long-drawn rhythmic phrase binds 
together the whole group of figures which surround the dead 
Christ. To illustrate this point I have chosen this Crucifixion 
from the Johnson Collection in Philadelphia (Fig. 8). It is a 
very original design, a genuine discovery of how to express 


Se 


Flemish Art 


a poignantly dramatic idea by the disposition of the main 
masses and by the linear rhythm in which the figures are 
described. 

At Burlington House we had the opportunity of seeing 
how van der Weyden’s sensibility to expressive design 
increased in the course of his career. 

In this early work (Fig. 9) the figures of Christ and the 
Virgin build up together a simple system held together by the 
continuous linear rhythm. This is reinforced by the repeti- 
tion of the contour in the mound that supports the Cross, but 
the saints and donor, though placed so as to balance fairly about 
the central figures, are not in rhythmic consonance with them, 
whilst the landscape, with its sharply cutting details, still 
further impedes any sense of unity. And in the picture 
all this dispersion of interest is accentuated by the use 
of the bright, showy local colours in sharp opposition. 
Note, for instance, how the Virgin’s white headdress tells 
against her blue robe and checks the flow of the linear 
design. 

Here in a later work (Fig.10) Rogier has repeated the main 
lines of the central figures, but he has found how to carry 
his rhythm throughout the whole picture. The figure of St. 
John is not merely added to it. It stabilizes and completes 
the group in an admirable way, and the Magdalene’s figure is 
so designed as to reinforce the central theme, as an accompani- 


ment may reinforce and enrich a melody. Note too how well - 


20 


aS 


Flemish Art 


he has corrected the treatment of the Virgin’s robe: how 
immensely the passionate. eagerness of her gesture is height- 
ened by the unbroken line of the deep blue mantle. Finally, 
the landscape is also designed in harmony with the rhythmic 
idea. ‘There are no longer any subsidiary and impertinent 
interests, it 1s treated in a broad generalized manner which is 
infinitely more in accordance with the main idea, while the 
over-arching curve of a tragic sunset glow embraces and 
unifies the whole design. ‘The expressive power of every part 
is incomparably increased by this continuity and coherence 
of the rhythmic structure. 

In his portraits we find the same power of sustaining the 
linear pattern through longer phrases than John van Eyck 
could manage, but they lack the body and density of John’s 
tone, they tend to become thin, to be even more merely linear 
maps of the features, though maps which have a consistent 
psychological bias. 

On the whole it is van der Weyden’s influence which 
predominates in the course of the Flemish tradition through- 
out the fifteenth century rather than that of John van Eyck. 
None of these successors attain to the force of the men who 
founded the school. Nowhere do we find such impeccable 
accuracy of eye as John van Eyck’s, nowhere so passionate 
a sense of tragedy nor such psychological insight asin Rogier 
van der Weyden. With Dierck Bouts a harsh angularity of 
form tends to break down even the linear rhythmic system, 

Pee 


Flemish Art 


whilst he remains even less sensitive to plastic possibilities than 
the older men. He becomes almost purely a narrator, and a 
narrator without any marked imaginative point of view. 
Van der Goes has a greater breadth of form and approaches 
more nearly to Rogier’s rhythmic feeling, though he remains 
far below him in the matter of significant disposition. His 
power of grasping relations even in two dimensions is very 
feeble, and he has no idea of relations in space. 

None of these artists add anything to the expressive possi- 
bilities of the pictorial idiom; on the contrary, they use it with 
a continually decreasing power, though each uses it to express 
his individual reactions to life. In so extremely condensed a 
review as I am obliged to make to-night, I am forced to 
concentrate on those artists who contribute some definitely 
new material to the tradition, and I shall therefore not delay 
longer over the artists I have named. But two other painters 
claim a little more attention, namely, Petrus Christus, who is 
almost the only one to follow in the footsteps of van Eyck, 
and Memling, who belongs decisively to the Rogier van der 
Weyden group. 

Petrus Christus appears to me to stand alone in the art 
of histime. His isa minor personality. I find in him nothing 
of the poetic intensity of Hubert’s imagination, nothing of 
the dramatic fervour of Rogier. The images which occur 
to his mind are undistinguished and conventional. 

Those who have written on Flemish painting have 

22 


Flemish Art 


naturally adopted the standpoint of decorative illustration. 
It is no wonder, then, that they have never thought much of 
Petrus Christus. None the less, he is the only Flemish painter 
of this period who was able to grasp something of Hubert van 
Eyck’s power of situating volumes in space. He is the only 
one who sees appearances with something of the contempla- 
tive vision of the Italian tradition. He is, in fact, the only 
Flemish primitive after Hubert van Eyck who conceives form 
plastically. 

You will see here (Fig. 11) at once how strong a contrast 
this makes with the map-like delineation of a Rogier van der 
Weyden portrait; how the rhythm is no longer that of lines on 
a surface but planes in space. There is a logical unity of con- 
struction here which we have not found hitherto; a logical 
unity which takes in the head as a whole, which does not 
exaggerate the importance of the mask but which keeps a due 
relation between it and the skull. 

It may be only a curious coincidence or it may be an 
explanation of this peculiarity of Christus that he is the only 
Fleming of this period who was in close contact with Italy. 
We know that at a certain moment he was in Milan with 
Antonello da Messina, and there can be little doubt that 
Antonello learned from him the Flemish technique of oil 
paint. The two artists show the greatest similarity in their 
work. Antonello continually designs his portrait heads on, the 
lines of Petrus Christus’s, and his small figure compositions 


23 


Flemish Art 


show a similar affinity. What I donot know is whether there 
was any converse iafluence—whether something of Petrus’s 
plastic feeling \as not directly due to Italian influence.? 

But not only was Christus able to construct credible 
volumes, he pushed even further than Hubert van Eyck the 
possibilities of situating them in a credible space, This 
Nativity (Fig. 12) stood out in marked isolation from its sur- 
roundings in this respect. Here we feel the space around each 
of the figures and we realize fully their relatively greater or 
less recession from the eye. Of course, in any picture which 
has verisimilitude we know which figure is meant to be in front 
of which—of course, when we see a tree drawn the size of a 
thumbnail beside a life-sized face we knowit must bea long way 
back, but in most Flemish primitive pictures we only know this 
as it were by deduction, the space and the volumes are not clearly 
present to the imagination as they are here. And this realiza- 
tion of space implies a sense of colour as a plastic function 
which is also almost entirely absent in primitive Flemish 
art. By this I mean that the colours are not merely related 
to each other upon the surface of the panel as the colours in 
a carpet or an embroidery, but are related in space, i.e. each 
colour must convey not merely the idea of a particular local 

* Compare, for instance, the St. Jerome by Petrus Christus (Fig. 11) with 
Antonello’s St. Jerome in the National Gallery. 


2 I have since found that Sir Charles Holmes had already suggested this in 


discussing the Grimston portrait which algp figured at Burlington Home 
See Burlington Magazine, June, 1925. 


24 


Flemish Art 


colour but of that colour situated in such and such a plane 
at such and such a distance from the eye, and that they must 
mutually sustain each other from this point of view. Now 
nothing was more striking than the way in which here the 
various colours maintained their position and thereby aroused 
a feeling of spacial freedom. It enabled Petrus, too, to realize 
his volumes with far slighter contrasts of colour, so that there 
was an ease and breadth in all the transitions. 

I shall not linger over Memling (Fig. 13). His charm is 
too evident to need any demonstration. We may place him 
fairly, I think, by saying that he used Rogier’s idiom in 
an entirely personal way. The quality of his emotional re- 
action to the religious drama is different. He has nothing 
of Rogier’s tragic pathos. He replaces that by tenderness 
and charm. He begins that new tendency to exploit the senti- 
mental aspects of life which we find contemporaneously in 
Perugino and which declares itself fully a generation later in 
Raphael in Italy and in Quentin Metsys in Flanders. But 
with Memling this tinge of sentimental feeling is very dis- 
creet. He never abandons himself. He has a certain shy 
pudor which is very attractive. As an artist he adds nothing 
to the powers of pictorial expression, except perhaps a certain 
softening of the surfaces as of a faint haze, as compared with 
the sharp hardness of the earlier artists. In many ways he 
goes back on the past and reverts to the illuminated manu- 
script. His delicately assorted colours have no plastic values 


“5 


Flemish Art 


—a blue will jump out here and there and assert itself as a 
positive though agreeable pigment, just as the local colours 
in a missal count as patches of colour on the vellum. Never- 
theless, Memling used this pictorial language with so delicate 
an accent that we could ill spare the page of decadent medieval 
sentiment which he inscribed. It is infinitely more sympa- 
thetic and accessible to us than the succeeding phase which is 
conveyed to us in the ghoulish imagery of Jerome Bosch. 

Before quitting this period of Flemish art and embarking 
on the sixteenth century, I should like to read you a few 
trenchant and disobliging sentences in which Michelangelo 
discusses the works we have been considering. Some of the 
Flemish pictures found their way to Italy, where their aston- 
ishing realism and their marvellous technique aroused the 
admiration of certain artists. They even led to some imi- 
tation on the part of such Italians as Ghirlandajo, whose 
temperaments inclined them to literalism. 

Naturally enough, Michelangelo, who aimed at a more 
universal and generalized pictorial language, was not in 
sympathy with Flemish art. This is what he says: 

“The painting of Flanders will generally satisfy any devout 
person more than the painting of Italy, which will never cause 
him to shed many tears; this is not owing to the vigour and 
goodness of that painting, but to the goodness of such devout 
person. 

“Women will like it, especially very old or very young 

26 


Flemish Art 


ones. It will please likewise friars and nuns and also some 
noble persons who have no true ear for harmony. They 
paint in Flanders, only to deceive the external eye, things that 
gladden you and of which you cannot speak ill, and saints and 
prophets. Their painting is of stuffs—bricks and mortar, 
the grass of the fields, the shadows of trees, and bridges and 
rivers, which they call landscapes, and little figures here and 
there; and all this, although it may appear good to some eyes, 
is in truth done without reasonableness or art, without sym- 
metry or proportion, without care in selecting and rejecting, 
and finally without any substance or verve; and in spite of all 
this, painting in some other parts is worse than it isin Flanders. 
Neither do I speak so badly of Flemish painting because I 
think it all bad, but because it tries to do so many things at 
once (each of which alone would suffice for a great work), so 
that it does not do anything really well. 

“Only works which are done in Italy can be called true 
painting, and therefore we call good painting Italian; for if 
it were done well in another country, we should give it the 
name of that country or province. Good painting is a music 
and a melody which intellect only can appreciate, and that 
with great difficulty. This painting is so rare that few are 
capable of doing or attaining to it.” 

I read this to you as a curiosity of contemporary criticism. 
I do not ask you to take Michelangelo’s word as authoritative 
any more than my own or anyone else’s. You must judge 


27 


Flemish Art 


for yourselves. It is evident that Michelangelo dreaded the 
imputation that his judgment was biassed by patriotic feel- 
ing and he asserts nobly the universality of art. 

Patriotism, were I subject to that feeling in matters of 
art where it has no place, would lead me in the opposite 
direction, for we English are akin to the early Flemings in 
our preference for narrative and illustrative art, in our insensi- 
tiveness to the appeal of architectonic and plastic design. If 
I seem to labour unduly this point it is because | am con- 
vinced that the highest pleasures which the imagination can 
derive from the art of painting are dependent on our under- 
standing that harmony of form which Michelangelo describes 
as the language of painting. 


28 


PART LL 


EXPLAINED in my first part that my programme 

was to get some idea of the course of Flemish painting in 

relation to the general movement of the European spirit 
as expressed in painting. What I call the central European 
tradition starts from Cimabue and has continued, now in 
one country, now in another, till our own day. But other 
traditions have sprung up from time to time and maintained 
an independent local existence; these I call, in reference to 
the main tradition, provincial. Early Flemish art was the 
most consistent, the most vigorous and fertile of those pro- 
vincial traditions, and it maintained its exclusive, independent, 
original and autochthonous character throughout the whole 
period which we surveyed very briefly in the first part of this 
lecture. 

We come now to the point when that isolation began to 
be broken down, we come to the beginning of the Italian 
infiltration. In the early sixteenth century Flemish painters 
began increasingly to go to Italy, and doubtless Italian pic- 
tures began to find their way into Flanders. ‘There sprang 
up a crop of Italianizing Flemish artists. For the most part 
those painters had no conception of the nature and purpose 


=) 


Flemish Art 


of Italian design as conceived by an artist like Michelangelo. 
What they saw and what struck their fancy was a new style 
of decoration. They had been of late increasingly fond of 
using architectural motives as a framework for their imagery, 
and here was a new fashion in architecture. The classical 
colonnade, the round arch, the frieze with its rows of putz 
and garlands—these were the new and interesting marks of a 
Renaissance picture, which fascinated their first superficial 
glance. It was a new fashion of trimming a design, a new 
embroidery. The late Gothic embroidery had become florid 
enough in all conscience, but it was sobriety itself compared 
with what these neophytes of the classic tradition made of 
their Renaissance models. ‘The puzti swarm everywhere, the 
garlands writhe, the architecture is carved over every inch 
of its surface, it is made of polished marble, of glass, of 
precious stones. 

There are few periods in the history of art when the 
misunderstanding of a foreign style has led to more preten- 
tious and exuberant bad taste. The very perfection of the 
technique, the deadly mechanical dexterity with which these 
details are executed increases the vulgarity of the result. 
Nor did the figures come short of their architectural setting, 
and those painters who had been to Milan to pick up from 
his feeble Lombard followers the secret of Leonardo’s smiling 
women, came back to Flanders to polish with desperate 
industry the simpering rigidity of their Madonna’s features. 


30 


Flemish Art 


Time fortunately forbids our discussing the Blondeels, the 
Pieter Coekes, the van Orleys and their kind, but one of the 
first of these Italianists claims our attention, viz. Quentin 
Metsys. Quentin was the sentimental heir of Memling. 
Memling had touched the chords of the tender sentiments with 
a delicate hand. Metsys shows less restraint. At times he is 
frankly sentimental, even affected; at others he stops short of 
this and then his power of rendering facial expression has 
its full effect. In his accessories he showed the florid bad 
taste of his day. We must overcome the repulsion which 
the superficial aspects and associations of his work arouse, 
for he was a very genuine and highly original artist. 

In a more detailed study than I can attempt to-night I 
should be able to point to slight indications in the work of 
Gerard David, Metsys’ predecessor, of a change to a more 
continuous rhythm, but in the main little had been done to 
enrich the pictorial idiom and still less to explore new possi- 
bilities of vision. But Metsys brings to appearances a recep- 
tive eye. 

Here in an early work (Fig. 14) his architecture is still 
Gothic. In spite of its over-elaborate mouldings it is well 
planned in its relation to the figure, but we note most that the 
Virgin’s robe falls in easier, more continuous lines which 
begin to reveal the volume and movement of the figure. 
The pattern is no longer linear, the succession of planes is 
clearly felt, and the figures evolve in a definite space. 


31 


Flemish Art 


In this later work (Fig. 15) Metsys has been converted to 
the Renaissance fashion in ornament. It is a comparatively 
restrained example, but' the proportions are none too happy, 
nor does he relate the throne to the figure as well as in the 
earlier example. But in the figures there is a new freedom of 
movement. The body and limbs begin to count more in the 
expression of the mood, the mask no longer predominates 
unduly. The drapery is more broadly planned, less cut up 
by a linear pattern of cross-folds. It falls over the knees, we 
feel the weight of the stuff which models the form it covers. 

We note too that, precise as the contours are, they have 
not the sharp cutting quality of primitive paintings. We 
feel that the contour is part of a plane which recedes from the 
eye. We are not brought up sharply on the surface of the 
panel by the edge. There is a suggestion of the envelopment 
of forms by atmosphere. There is here, too, a suggestion of 
the changes of local colour under the different incidences of 
light, of the grey discoloration in the high lights and of the 
wermer reflected lights in shadow. 

Thic breaking of the positive local colour implies a new 
possibility of unity in the colour harmony; the same light 
will be found influencing all the local colours and giving them 
a common quality pervading and bringing together the whole 
design. And the atmospheric enyelopment is not merely a 
question of a truer vision of appearances, it gave to Metsys a 
new power of pictorial organization. 


32 


FIG. 18 


Proverb of the Bird-nesters. Pieter Brueghel. 


(Kunsthisches-Hofmuseum, Vtenna.) 


FalGee 12 


Nativity. Petrus Christus. 
(In the Collection of Henry Goldman, Esq.) 


oo 


FIG. 18 


Madonna and Child with Angel. Hans Memling. 
(Collection of M. E. Renders.) 


(bsqy ‘stsapp jauorzy fo uoy2a1]/09) (‘bsq ‘sstusag uostg ‘yo ‘9 fo u01499110.)) 


‘sASJOJ UTUANG) “SAS]OT\ 
‘S]JasUp omy YpM PY) puv vuuopypy unUENG ‘sjasup Yypm ppyg puv vuuopyyy 


Ab See 
es 70 


4 


ue 


(‘quayy ‘sj4p-xnvag sap aasnyy) (‘4oupoy fo japy ayl fo uoyrayoj ayt uz) 
"yosoq owmole{ ‘awmodaf “75 ‘sASjoJN UNUENG ‘snipisy fo pIwLj40g 


Lee) Let JEL 


(‘Sjassnag ‘Sj4p-xnvag sap agsnypy) 


‘Jaysonig Joajaq ‘snipoz fo Joy ayy 


Cla at 


(‘puuary ‘unasniufof] Sayrsiaojsiyjsuny) 


‘Joysonig Joleiq ‘Avg Aivnuvf 


06 “OIA 


aN, ib “ H m: 
es Pata Fa 


FIG. 21 


Portrait of a Lady. Frans Floris. 
(Musée de Caen.) 


eit 


4 


41, 


EiGae22 


Adoration of the Magi. Rubens. 


(Antwerp Museum.) 


a 


i 
} 
1 


Flemish Art 


To understand that fully we must consult his great altar- 
piece at Antwerp. Here one can see that he is able by his 
tone and colour envelopes to wrap up as it were whole pass- 
ages of the design and subordinate them thusone to another. 

Thus the whole of the rocky mass on which the 
crosses stand, though it is full of incident and clear detail, 
is held together in a single envelope of tone and colour, 
the extreme distance and sky in another, and the figures in 
a third; each of these then becomes a clearly distinguished 
element in the design, each can be grasped at once by the eye 
as a single whole and the dominance of the figure group is 
made evident. In these qualities Metsys is not only an inno- 
vator in Flemish art; his command of an inherited tradition 
of oil painting with its power of fusion and subtlety of 
transitions gives him an instrument which no Italian of this 
date had quite mastered. 

In other respects this is a remarkable composition. In 
its contours it is clearly based on Rogier van der Weyden’s 
“Deposition” at the Escorial, but by his greater command of 
tone, Metsys is able to articulate his composition more clearly, 
to hold within one envelope of tone the whole group of 
figures around the dead Christ, contrasting it with those 
farther to the right. The rocky mass behind is admirably 
planned to recall and support the main group. 

In this portrait of Egidius (Fig. 16) we were able to see 
something of those qualities of Metsys’ art. There is still 


33 % 


Flemish Art 


a certain meagreness and angularity about the forms—in 
comparison, for instance, with Lorenzo di Credi’s portrait— 
but there is an approach to Italian art in the realization of 
the volume of the whole figure and its relation to space. 
There is a free circulation of air about it which is new in 
Northern art. 

From now on the Italian influence persists, but the native 
tradition did not give way without a struggle. Medieval 
ideology in one of itsstrangest and most characteristic forms 
flamed up in a final outburst. A grotesque element—and 
often an obscenely grotesque one—had always been tolerated 
in medieval religious imagery, and it was this grotesque 
humour that marked its last phase. All the wild conceits 
which the “lawless and incertain thoughts” of medieval 
times had begotten are collected in the nightmare visions of 
Jerome Bosch, whose art had an immense vogue, especially 
in Spain. 

It seems incredible that anyone should have been turned 
from his evil ways by looking at Bosch’s bogey-storeys. But 
he was commended as a moral influence and learnedly com- 
mented by Spanish pietists. That enigmatic and sinister 
figure Philip II of Spain, who found delight in the freest of 
Titian’s mythological poesies, found edification in contem- 
plating Jerome Bosch’s pictorial sermons. ‘That aspect of his 
art, for all its historical curiosity, must not detain us. What 
is important is the strange paradox that this reactionary, 


id 


Flemish Art 


moralizing medizvalist was a born painter, much more so 
indeed than many of his contemporaries, like Patinir,who were 
sensitive to Renaissance ideas. Here, in one of his many 
versions of the Temptation of St. Anthony (Fig. 17), behind 
the ungainly Gothic figure of St. Jerome—though it too in 
its way is admirably drawn—behind all the spiky horrors 
and monstrosities which surround him, Bosch spreads a land- 
scape of suave and luminous beauty which anticipates later 
conceptions. 

Even in his grimmest, most repulsive inventions he keeps 
a richness and sobriety of tone and a delicate sensitiveness of 
handling which are the last qualities we should have expected 
from such a point of departure. 

Bosch had then the persuasive power to check the new 
movement. His inheritance was taken up by an even more 
remarkable and original personality, by Pieter Brueghel. 
Pieter Brueghel demands far more time than we can afford. 
I cannot hope to justify my estimate of him. I must merely 
state it as briefly as possible. Brueghel appears to me to be 
essentially an illustrator rather than an artist. He is the 
counterpart in his day of a great cartoonist. If he were alive 
now he would try to draw for Punch, but he would not be 
allowed to. There is at this moment, alas! no comic paper 
serious enough to welcome so uncompromising, so desper- 
ately genuine an illustrator as Brueghel or one with so deep 
and bitter a note of tragedy behind the comic pretext of his 


35 


Flemish Art 


designs. But I repeat he was an illustrator—his designs are 
the outcome of a moral and psychological, not of a visual, 
inspiration. His morality has the robust and rather brutal 
common sense of the peasant, it renders his shrewd proverbial 
philosophy. But Brueghel could not have externalized these 
ideas in speaking images had he not possessed great visual 
gifts. His eye is the eye of a caricaturist picking out from 
appearance just those telling contours which give character, 
those movements that express states of mind. 

In this region of the imagination, which is more often 
treated in literature than in painting, he is a great inventor; he 
has at times strange imaginative insight, and his imagery has 
the sharpest accent of life. Form is then for him subservient 
to the expression of psychological realities. He does not 
speak to the mind directly through visible harmonies but by 
the associations which his images call up, by their references 
to actual life. 

Here (Fig. 18) is one of his many designs based on popular 
proverbs. As far as I can make out, this illustrates one to 
the effect that “He who knows where the nest is has the 
knowledge, but he who takes it has the nest’’; in which the 
fatuous self-satisfaction of the theorist—the art critic, I sup- 
pose—is contrasted to the practical energy of the boy who 
takes the trouble to swarm up the tree—the artist. It is not 
one of his most poignant conceptions, but it has the rank 
savour of peasant life in the vigorous and rather brutal draw- 


36 


Flemish Art 


ing of the man’s figure and in the charm of his literal rendering 
of a familiar countryside. 

But it has no essentially pictorial quality. It has none 
of that harmony of form which Michelangelo speaks of; the 
relations of the forms to one another are adequate to express 
the humorous moralizing of the proverb, but, apart from that, 
arouse no emotion in the spectator’s mind. 

But Brueghel’s imagination was wide in its range. It 
was not always confined to the shrewd humour of the peasant; 
he had moods now of more lyrical, now of more tragic import. 
Of the tragic mood we have many examples, of which a 
drawing of men taking honey from bees is a good example, 
so monstrous and menacing do the figures become in Brue- 
ghel’s interpretative line. Or we may take a better-known 
instance, the parable of the blind leading the blind, at Naples. 

The lyrical mood is far rarer. ‘This picture of Icarus (Fig. 
1g) indeed stands out so singularly in his euvre that many 
have disputed its authenticity. I cannot doubt that it is his. 
Like so many of his fellow-artists at this period, Brueghel went 
to Rome. No one, one thinks, had less reason to go there; 
no one was likely to profit less than he by Michelangelo’s 
precepts. However, he went, and, as we might perhaps have 
guessed from the quality of his humour, he took no harm by 
it. Italian art did not bite on his robust native genius. But 
if Italian art failed to move him, Italian landscape clearly did, 
and we have many charming drawings of Southern scenes, and 


a7 


Flemish Art 


in more than one we find him exchanging his native proverbs 
for motives taken from classical mythology. That much he 
conceded to the genius loci, but, as you see, his concession is 
rather grudging, for Icarus is here reduced to two minute 
sprawling legs in the middle distance and a familiar-looking 
peasant takes the leading rédle. It seems to me that this 
picture is the record of Brueghel’s response to some moment 
of lyrical exaltation when the Mediterranean first flashed on 
his astonished gaze as he made his way down the Alps. But 
for all its exaltation the forms remain descriptive; its evocations 
are through associated ideas rather than by their directly 
expressive power. 

Before leaving the fascinating figure of Pieter Brueghel, 
I must show you one of his great series of the months. This, 
of a January day (Fig. 20), seems to me almost the highest 
point of his poetical interpretation of the aspects of nature. 
The literary possibilities of painting have indeed rarely 
achieved greater triumphs than this. 

Throughout the sixteenth century Antwerp was the home 
of a productive school, in which two currents ran side by 
side. On the one hand were those who stuck to the native 
tradition as interpreted by Brueghel, of which Pieter Aertsen 
and Beuckelaar were the chief names; on the other there were 
artists like Jan Metsys, Lambert Lombard, and Frans Floris, 
who called themselves ““Romanists.” ‘They endeavoured to 
be as correctly Italian as possible, that is to say, they filled 


38 


Flemish Art 


their pictures with crowds of “correct” Italian poses—but it 
was still the old trouble which Michelangelo had pointed 
out in the primitives, that of putting in too many things 
each of which would have sufficed for a good picture. 

But even “Romanists” had moments when they forgot 
to be correctly and boringly Italian. In such a portrait as 
this of an old lady (Fig. 21), Frans Floris found himself doubt- 
less rather at a loss to know what the Giulio-Romanesque 
translation of the facts before him was and fell back on his 
native acuteness of observation and his inherited technical 
ability. And the result is admirable. Nothing shows better 
the innate qualities which were too often obscured by the 
academic ambitions of such men. It shows, too, how, since 
Brueghel had shown the way, Flemish technique was gaining 
in freedom of handling and elasticity. ‘These artists were 
indeed gradually evolving a manner of oil painting by free 
scumblings over a transparent brown groundwork. That 
manner, at once perfectly methodical and precise and yet 
allowing of the freest modifications, was the instrument most 
perfectly adapted to Rubens’s all-embracing genius. 

Otto Vcenius, the last of the Romanists, was as dully 
academic as the rest. His work is like that of some imitator 
of Giulio Romano, but at least he organized his designs with 
some lucidity. It was one of Rubens’s many good fortunes 
that he went to school with so intelligent a designer. 

In Rubens at last the currents of Northern and Southern 


39 


Flemish Art 


art coalesce to produce a new and complete style. In Rubens 
all that wealth of experience which Flemish artists in their 
love of the vivid actualities of life had accumulated finds 
expression, no longer in tangled confusion but through a 
clear and melodious articulation. 

I suspect that every one who puts paint on canvas is 
likely to be a little too much seduced by Rubens. He is 
so miraculous a painter that beside him every one else seems 
a little amateurish. This is not to say that he is the greatest 
of artists, not even that he belongs to the supreme rank. He 
never reaches the highest summits of imaginative truth, he 
never plumbs the depths of feeling; his experience is not 
transcendent; it lies within the boundaries of the common 
lot. He is the great master of the commonplace, but the 
commonplace realized in its fullest intensity and expressed 
with incomparable perfection. 

Rubens’s position in the landscape of European art 
is unique. In him the whole tradition is focussed; for 
when he came Italian art had lost the thread. Baroccio, the 
one painter whose art held the germs of a consistent develop- 
ment, had been overlooked. Academism in the persons of 
the Caracci, and crude sensationalism in the person of Cara- 
vaggio, had brought confusion and disaster. It was Rubens 
who recovered the clue. Already Voenius had given him a 
decent framework within which his prolific inborn talent 
could develop, and his journey to Italy in 1600, his long stay 


40 


» 


Flemish Art 


with the hospitable Gonzagas at Mantua, enabled him to dis- 
cover the essential principles of Baroque design and elaborate 
them to their highest possibilities of expressiveness. 

It was thus that he forged one of the most perfect instru- 
ments of pictorial expression that the world has ever seen. 

One of the essentials of the Baroque style was the amplifi- 
cation and enlargement of the rhythmic phrase. An example 
from architecture will make this clear: In the classic style of 
the Renaissance each storey of a building formed a separate 
unit—with perhaps a series of pilasters supporting a moulding 
on which were placed the pilasters of the next storey. In 
Baroque the whole fagade would be regarded as one colon- 
nade; the pilasters would be raised ona stilted base, and, run- 
ning nearly the whole height of the fagade, would support 
a single, much more massive, cornice, and perhaps an attic. 
The whole facade would thus be bracketed into a single 
phrase instead of being made of a series of successive phrases. 

A similar enlargement of the phrase was devised by 
painters, and to this was added a great increase of movements 
in depth; movements, that is, at right angles or diagonal to the 
picture plane and leading the eye back into the composition. 

There was a lack at Burlington House of large composi- 
tions by Rubens, soI must refer you to the ‘Adoration of the 
Magi” at Antwerp (Fig. 22) as one of the best examples 
of Rubens’s practice in such Baroque composition. 

Here you see a single great curving diagonal holds 


41 


Flemish Art 


together in its sweep nearly everything in the picture. And 
this diagonal is not built up by forms that are at the same 
distance from the eye. The forms are arranged so as to 
lead the eye gradually backwards until we pass out of the 
stable into the open air beyond. Here the curve takes a 
spiral form and, in the figures on the camels and the camels’ 
heads, brings us back again towards theforeground. This curve 
is big and bold enough to hold in its sweep the greatest diversity 
of subsidiary motives which enrich and amplify it without 
breaking its main movement. We can find endless minor 
phrases which comment on the main theme. Another motive 
comes in with the Madonna and Child. This has many 
analogies with the first. It, too, tends to a spiral form with 
the freest play of movements of depth. Its stronger accent 
more than compensates for its smaller scale, and perhaps we 
should regard it as the central theme about which the larger 
motive evolves. 

You will realize what a powerful instrument of pictorial 
organization this is if you consider how vivid a sense you 
have of this crowd of figures pressing into the stable, how 
sharp the individuality of their gestures, how complex and 
rich their gear, and yet all this is embraced by the eye as a 
single whole with perfect ease. We ourselves are not crowded 
and jostled, the imagined movements which we are invited 
to make are everywhere free, the transitions lead our eye 
this way and that, into the distance and back again, always 


42 


Flemish Art 


with the same easy movement. In short, it is a masterpiece 
of plastic organization which unites the utmost complexity 
of material with the utmost simplicity and lucidity of form. 

Nothing is more remarkable about Rubens’s art than the 
fact of his extraordinary feeling for volume and plasticity. 
We have seen again and again how inapt the Flemish, like 
all Northern peoples, were for such an imaginative compre- 
hension of form, how instinctively they sought for flat linear 
descriptions of the solid reality, and how entirely they were 
preoccupied with organizing their designs on the flat by means 
of contour and silhouette, and yet here at last is a Fleming 
who not only grasps what Italian art had achieved in this 
direction, but actually carries it farther. 

In this he was helped by a very special gift, that, namely, of 
a marvellous power of visualization; i.e. whatever pose of a 
figure he might require, however improbable or extravagant 
it might be, he was able to bring to his inner vision an ade- 
quate and convincing image of it and project this on to the 
canvas. I do not say that these images were always very 
subtle in their interpretation of character as seen through 
gesture—it was indeed a defect of the Baroque style that it 
found its best opportunities in poses of a rather too demon- 
strative and obvious eloquence, but none the less these images 


1 A comparison of this with the original sketch in the Wallace Collection 
will show how much Rubens has enriched and simplified the first idea in his 
final painting. 


43 


Flemish Art 


which Rubens conceived with such unfailing resource are 
convincing and assured. Tintoretto, whose love of rapid 
improvisation demanded a similar gift, had nothing like his 
power in this respect. Beside Rubens’s, his fluttering angels 
and falling nude figures are hesitating and uncertain concep- 
tions for all the vehement bravura of his execution. 

I do not think that any of the pictures at Burlington 
House gave the full measure of Rubens’s power in this 
respect, but we may take the “Martyrdom of St.Ursula” (Fig. 
23) as fairly exemplary. Here a great number of figures are 
shown in poses so instantaneous that none could have been 
studied by direct observation. Rubens had to rely upon his 
visual imagination with its stored-up knowledge of all the 
aspects of forms. And notice how perfectly all these forms 
fit into the turbulent rush of the rhythm, how definitely that 
rhythm is one of sequences of planes and not of lines, and 
how the diagonal movement into the depth of the picture 
space allows room for all this huddled confusion and gives it 
a harmonious unity. Note, too, the dramatic value given to 
the figure of St. Ursula and the executioner who is on the 
point of cutting her down by making this a nodal point in 
the rhythmic theme, for here the main diagonal movement is 
sharply countered by St. Ursula’s gesture as she is dragged 
down by the executioner to the left. This counter-movement 
is again picked up to the right. 

Sketch though it is, this picture gives one a better insight 

44 


Flemish Art 


than many into Rubens’s colour, and tone composition. So 
I shall do what I can to remind you of it. The early idea of 
colour harmony was of positive tints in certain proportions 
placed side by side. We saw that Metsys had already begun 
a more unified system by noting a common influence on all 
the local colours which were subject to the same incident 
light. Rubens carries this much farther. With him that uni- 
fying colour of light becomes as it werethe dominant key of 
the colour scheme, and he suggests local colours by very slight 
variations from that. This key is so strictly felt underlying 
a whole passage that it is surprising what brilliance of local 
colour can be suggested by tints actually very far from 
bright. A dull earthy red will appear to be vermilion, or 
with more white will give vivid carnations—a grey that is 
little more than black and white will suggest an atmospheric 
blue, and so on. This method gives the greatest possible 
unity to a picture. It has the utmost fusion and continuity, 
which is then punctuated by brilliant accents of white impasto 
in the lights and accents of transparent blacks or reds in the 
shadows. No one else has ever mastered a technique at once so 
methodical and economical and yet so flexible that it adapts 
itself to an infinite variety of colour effects and the greatest 
diversity of material. Naturally this also enabled Rubens 
to use, at once more subtly and more forcibly, Metsys’ 
discovery of the envelope, and he can contrast his envelopes 
by very slight changes of key. 
45 


Flemish Art 


Here the right-hand bottom part of the composition is in 
shadow, which is broadly contrasted with the bright light on 
the St. Ursula group. But Rubens does not want to break the 
unity of his design by sharp contrasts, so this shadow is strongly 
lit by reflected light. In actual tone it is indeed hardly any 
darker than the lighted portion. None the less, the envelope of 
tone over all this part suggests to us very clearly a much stronger 
contrast than is actually given. A single, just perceptibly 
brighter note on the neck of the lowest figure gives us the 
point de repére by which we judge that the almost equally 
bright tones and colours around are in shadow. So solid 
and broad is the general tone and colour structure that Rubens 
can permit himself sudden accents like the black of the execu- 
tioner’s armour without breaking the system. 

We have gained some idea of the extraordinary power 
with which Rubens handled the Baroqueconception of design. 
Here, in a sketch for the Flight into Egypt (Fig. 24), we get 
a notion of the freshness and spontaneity of his art; for | 
Rubens was no academic; the astonishing scholarship and 
logic of his designs does not prevent him from keeping that 
close hold on the actual things of life which characterized the 
Flemish all along. He has here visualized the Flight as a 
very genuine flight. The supernatural nature of the guide 
does not prevent him from straining forward into the darkness 
with a very human and expressive gesture, as he searches for a 
propitious place to ford the stream. Joseph trudges forward 


46 


Flemish Art 


with an appearance of effort, and the donkey’s movement is as 
startlingly lifelike; opposed to these is the statuesque calm of 
the Virgin wrapped in the consciousness of her exalted state. 
Rembrandt alone could have come nearer to dramatic truth, 
or rather would have penetrated a little deeper into the spirit 
of his actors. But on the plane he chooses Rubens misses noth- 
ing. And no less perfect is the setting: the gloom of the wood 
from which the Holy Family are emerging, the shimmer of 
moonlight on the water and the contrasting warm light from 
the angel’s torch. All this is suggested with an incredible 
economy of means by a few unerring indications here and 
there, and yet the illusion is complete. And all this precise 
observation, this close contact with familiar appearances, is 
somehow conciliated with a rare poetic elevation of style. 
Our attention is never called aside by the impertinent attrac- 
tion of imitative realism, of mere verisimilitude. All these 
vivid details are kept in their place; they do not break that 
harmonious flow of rhythm, that easy, measured utterance, 
which mark a great style, and which prompt the imagination 
to a mood of elevated detachment. It is just here that 
Rubens reaps the advantages of his double artistic ancestry. 
He has by birthright that Flemish immediacy of contact with 
life, and he has acquired the Italian conception of a detached 
and contemplative vision of form, and grasps its universal 
principles. 

We must turn now to the portraits. The masterpiece of 


47 


Flemish Art RAL 
portraiture at Burlington House was in my opinion this 
picture of Yrsselius (Fig. 25), done just after the Abbot’s 
death from drawings executed just before. Rubens probably 
knew his sitter well, as he owed to him one of his most impor- 
tant commissions. Certainly he rarely painted a portrait with 
such intimacy of feeling, such penetrating discernment. It 
is a proof of Rubens’s extraordinary visual memory that 
without the living model before him he could give so precise 
a notion of the tremulous flaccidity of the old ecclesiastic’s 
flesh—even to the want of control‘of the muscles of the mouth; 
and he has given, too, all the distinction and refinement of © 
character that still dominates the failing physique. Compare 
this with John van Eyck’s Canon and one sees how much is 
gained by the more detached vision of the later artist. For 
here that surprising realism of texture does not, as in van 
Eyck, impede our grasp of the whole. It takes its place, and 
only its due subordinate place, in the design. Even more 
strongly than the quality of the flesh we feel the delicate 
forcefulness of the bony structure of head and hands. Miracu- 
lous as the detail is, it does not conceal the more fundamental 
characteristics of form. 

A very different mood obtains in this dashing portrait of 
Legafiez, the Spanish envoy to The Hague (Fig. 26), against 
whom Rubens was pitted in a diplomatic struggle between 
England, France, Spain and the Low Countries. In that 
affair all Rubens’s carefully laid plans for peace were ruined 


48 


he 


Mariyrdom of St. Ursula. Rubens. 
J (Musée Royal des Beaux-Arts, Brussels.) 


i 
’ 
’ 
. Y 
or 
shes 
t- 
a 
a 
i 


. 


FIG. 24 


Flight into Egypt. Rubens 


(In the Collection of C. S. Gulbenkian.) 
FIG. 30 


Pan and Syrinx. Jordaens. 
(Musée Royal des Beaux-Arts, Brussels.) 


~ 


FIG. 25 


Portrait of Yrsselius. Rubens 
(Museum of Fine Arts, Copenhagen.) 


FIG. 26 


Portrait of Don Diego Messiad, Marqués de Legaies. Rubens. 
(In the Collection of Mrs. Gutekunst.) 


(‘yoorquyson fo javq ayy fo uorsajjoj ay. uz) 


‘suoqny “UuossD YA, 4aqQUy, AY T 


yaa) ts 


i 


(puoyy pasfip “s fo uosa0Q ayt uy) 
‘suoqny ‘“7YsUuoop :advospuvT 


86 “OTH 


FIG. 29 


The Burgomaster of Diest and his Wife. Jacob Jordaens. 
(In the Collection of the Duke of Devonshire.) 


(‘a4anoT ayq uz) 
JaMnoig ‘advospunT 


T€ “Old 


Flemish A y 


by the instructions which Legafiez brought from Spain. But 
Rubens was too much of a great gentleman to let this interfere 
with his personal relations, too keen a salesman to let it lose 
him a commission. ‘That he had no great opinion of this type 
we may guess, but he has given him the advantages, such as 
they are, of the self-conscious importance of a Spanish grandee. 
If there is-a touch of irony it lies in the extreme interest 
which he has shown in the armour, but then, from the 
gentleman’s appearance, one guesses that the point was lost 
on him. 

It is in his landscapes that Rubens shows most clearly 
the freshness of his outlook and the flexibility of his style. 
For here he was breaking new ground. In landscape 
he stakes out a claim that it required centuries to exploit 
fully. | 

Here, for instance (Fig. 27), is the general idea of almost 
all that the eighteenth and early nineteenth century school 
of landscape accomplished in England; all, that is, until 
Constable started impressionism. And in another small 
work at Burlington House he is seen rivalling Con- 
stable himself, going almost beyond him and hinting at 
Renoir. 

And mark, it is not merely Rubens’s alertness to new 
impressions and new aspects of nature but his power straight 
away to give these an adequate pictorial interpretation: to 
transmute them into the key of great style. It is no mere 


49 E 


Flemish Art 


imitation—it is not at all analogous to the venture of Pol 
de Limbourg which implied little but imitative facility. 
Rubens not only looks at what had escaped the artist’s 
regard up to then, he both looks and discovers the 
plastic and pictorial interpretation, which is a very different 
matter. 

Doubtless every sensitive spirit since the beginning of 
human life has been moved by such a still moonlight night 
as this (Fig. 28), but the actual visual sensations lie so far 
outside the range of the painter’s scale that the problem of 
translating them into clear pictorial imagery has baffled almost 
every one. I doubt if anything at once so evocative of such an 
effect and so coherent a design has ever been discovered even 
by modern landscape painters. It is hard to dismiss so briefly 
such a figure as Rubens, whose character is moreover in many 
waysso puzzling. A great bourgeois gentleman, supremely a 
man of the world, avariciously commercial in all his affairs, 
loving power and domination and yet gifted with the most 
alert sensibility to such spiritual experiences as lay within the 
limits of ordinary successful worldly life. 

But above all comes his power to turn all such experiences 
into easy harmonious pictorial expression. In its spontaneous 
ease of movement, its adaptability to almost any material, that 
gift is in painting curiously like Shakespeare’s in poetry. 
Where they differ is in the vastly deeper and rarer experi- 
ences to which Shakespeare was sensitive. It is no wonder 


50 


Flemish Art 


that Rubens dominated his age. No wonder that Vandyck 
was content to be his impeccable pupil, his best substitute. 
Vandyck’s was a pliant nature, without inner conviction or 
grasp of reality, liable to all external influences. 

In his fine portrait of Anthon Trieste it is Italy, and 
Bassano in particular, that has given him an unusual force and 
impetus. It is a fine design powerfully realized. 

It was not till later on when he settled in England that 
he became original. But his originality consisted in abandon- 
ing the higher purposes of painting and directing himself to 
a kind of superior millinery. His taste in millinery is exquisite, 
he is the inventor of new combinations of the politest, 
most distinguished harmonies. But his harmonies are those 
of nicely assorted silks and satins, they create no world of their 
own, they remain decorative schemes upon the wall. His 
was the most discreetly courtierlike, the most politely sub- 
servient art that had yet been created. His images satisfied 
the vanity of his sitters but did not venture to compete with 
their own forceful personalities. With infinite discretion he 
stays in the background. His pictures are the last perfection 
of furniture for the drawing-rooms of the great. 

Jordaens was a very different matter. One can hardly 
estimate the force of character which he must have exercised 
to free himself from the dominant attraction of his master 
Rubens. That he did so at whatever cost is almost a title to 
greatness. 


SI 


Flemish Art 


His gifts were so remarkable that we should speak and 
think of him more often, were he not always a little in. the 
shade cast by Rubens’s vast figure. And yet he is very 
distinct. He is at once more crudely provincial and more 
Italianate than Rubens. 

Those of you who have read T7// Eulenspiegel will remem- 
ber how, through all the tragic sufferings of the struggle with 
Spain and the Inquisition, the Flemish persisted in a kind of 
poetical glorification of good cheer, almost one might say of 
gluttony. Gluttony is too ugly a word, but the Flemish 
appetite was too robust for Epicureanism. It is the poetry of 
Flemish goinfrerie, since we have no exact word for it, which 
Jordaens celebrates in so many of his compositions where 
even the colour takes on a kind of luscious ripeness and 
juiciness. 

Jordaens reverts as much as it was possible at such a period 
to the opposition of pure local colours. Whilst Rubens 
goes forward and anticipates the chromatic discoveries of 
the nineteenth century, Jordaens looks back to primitive 
practice. 

This contrast came out particularly in this imposing and 
radiant work (Fig. 29), which held its own even in the good 
company of the large gallery at Burlington House. The 
sonority and richness of these reds and blacks and the notes 
of intense blue-green were almost too cruel to Vandyck’s 
Whistlerian arrangements. One feels that there was the 


52 


Flemish Art 
possibility of malice in Jordaens’s jovial sympathy. He is 
sympathetically humorous about the expansive and expanded 
hausfrau, but his humour turns a little bitter over the pre- 
tentious husband who has managed to get himself made 
Burgomaster and will not let anyone forget it. 

Jordaens keeps, then, much of his native quality, its 
immediacy, its love of the concrete and particular, but 
strangely enough there is another strain in his genius, At 
times his Baroque designs are grotesquely exuberant and even 
vulgar, but at others he aims at a more subtle, more austere 
architecture of form than Rubens. The Pan and Syrinx 
(Fig. 30) is an admirable instance. Here, for all the gross- 
ness of individual types, the general quality of the design 
comes very near in its restraint and simplicity to the great 
Italians. 

A few other artists of the seventeenth century remain to 
be noticed shortly. Teniers, whose name once loomed much 
larger than it does now, was not seen at his best, though one 
picture, the large “Landscape with reapers cutting corn,” 
showed how genuine and original he could be at times. The 
disposition of the forms in which rectangular shapes predomi- 
nate shows a daring simplicity of statement which re- 
minds one of Poussin. Like that artist’s “Ruth and Boaz” 
in the Louvre, it was an expression of a reaction from the florid 
exuberance of Baroque design to a more austere architectural 
planning. 


ape 


Flemish Art 


Sieberechts shows another strange excursion from the 
normal idiom of the day. His landscape with a peasant 
woman, a child and cows seemed prophetic of that kind 
of photographic realism which we generally suppose to have 
been one of the most deplorable inventions of the nineteenth 
century. 

But one other artist, Adriaen Brouwer, made a vivid 
impression. Though Flemish by birth he worked in Holland, 
and his temperament seems to have inclined him to accept 
the Dutch rather than the distinctively Flemish pictorial 
idiom. 

Italian influence came later to Holland than to Belgium 
and never predominated as it had there. No artist of any- 
thing like Rubens’s power took up the Italian conception of 
design. The result was that the Dutch developed a Baroque 
tradition of their own. It was one in which little attention 
was paid to any a priori rhythmic schemes such as haunt 
Rubens’s art. Rhythm indeed was attained, but rather by a 
delicately sensitive interpretation of actual scenes, by a nice 
choice of the quantities enclosed in the frame, by a subtle 
evaluation of spacial values and by an exquisite feeling for 
tone and colour. It gave expression to a penetrating and 
profound interpretation of actual vision rather than the power 
so marvellously shown by Rubens and Jordaens of embodying, 
by reference to actual vision, an a priori scheme. 

Brouwer is typical of this alternative Dutch conception 


54 


Flemish Art 


of design. He is a stranger to mythology, whether Christian 
or pagan. His imagery is limited to the scenes of daily life. 
He found his inspiration in the lowlife of Dutch wayside inns, 
in scenes of drunken conviviality or drunken brawls, but his 
interpretation of these familiar events, though it may well have 
satisfied the most naive curiosity by its precise verisimilitude, 
conforms to much higher demands of the imagination. His 
figures for all their vivid likeness to the most vulgar reality 
have the mark of a great style. Clever and incisive though 
the detail is, it is always held in subordination to the 
necessities of formal harmony. His figures have that broad 
simplicity of contour, that easy rhythmical movement of 
planes which distinguishes the greatest art. Whether Michel- 
angelo, could he have seen them, would have stopped to look 
beneath the uncongenial pretext, I doubt, but, had he done 
so, he would have recognized that Brouwer was not ignorant 
of that melody of form which he adored. And Brouwer vies 
with Rubens in the alert readiness of his sensibility. ‘The 
little landscape lent by the Louvre to the exhibition (Fig. 
31) proves this. The drunken peasants reeling home from 
the tavern through the wood form, for his strangely tem- 
pered imagination, an integral part of the poetical mood which 
emerges from this intimate record of a moment when the 
evening light transforms the banal realities of everyday life. 
Almost everything that Brouwer did has this rare quality of 
imaginative interpretation. When we reflect that he died 


oa 


ee , a TE. uae 
fg be Bi a lh | oN 


| — s , , Flemish Art 7 
See at about thirty years of age, we have to count a mc 
| most gifted of Flemish artists. a 

. I fear that by now I have tried your patience to its 
1 ¢. limit. I can now make amends in only one Me | 
sparing you a peroration. 


“? r Printed in Great Britain by Butler & Tanner Ltd., Frome prt London a 


4 ’ | | 2 “ 
. Y ‘ _ 
a Oy rR ie 


ea ee. + as, 

sae 

eae 

as | * ae, iso ‘ 

c “ mv ¢ 

hae > Be 1 » Pj + 
oy * ‘ af . - : Fs oe * * 
aves os ! A * 

7 

es * ’ 


~ 


